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Underworld

A Naples couple was killed in their car in April after their son renounced the Camorra.Credit
Ciro Fusco/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

To the average tourist, or even the devoted Italophile, the Italy of Roberto Saviano’s “Gomorrah” is an utterly unrecognizable place. There is no Renaissance art, no leisurely lunches or bustling piazzas, no world-class design, no achingly beautiful landscapes. Instead, we find an alien land of doped-up child soldiers, gun-toting clan women, illegal Chinese immigrants, sweatshops, drug smuggling, garbage and cement.

This is Campania, the region whose capital is Naples and pulsing heart the Camorra, or Neapolitan mafia. Thanks to the Camorra — the book’s title is a dark play on words — Campania has one of the highest murder rates in Europe, one of the world’s highest ratios of drug dealers to inhabitants, soaring levels of unemployment and cocaine addiction, and elevated cancer rates linked to toxic waste dumping. Since 1979, 3,600 people have died at the hands of the Camorra — more than have been killed by the Sicilian Mafia, the Irish Republican Army or the Basque group ETA. Just last month, the pope made a special visit to Naples to denounce the “deplorable” violence in the region, the result of continuing drug wars between rival clans. The dead do not leave this world peaceably. In “Gomorrah,” bodies are decapitated with circular saws, strangled slowly, drowned in mud, tossed down wells with live grenades, shot point blank near a statue of Padre Pio. A young priest who dared speak out is murdered and posthumously accused of cavorting with whores. Even after death, Saviano writes, “you are guilty until proven innocent.”

A powerful work of reportage, “Gomorrah” became a literary sensation when it appeared in Italy last year, selling an astonishing 600,000 copies. It started a national conversation, but also won its 28-year-old first-time author uglier accolades: death threats and a constant police escort. He now lives in hiding. The stakes are high. In “Gomorrah,” Saviano charts the Camorra’s involvement in the garment industry and its grip on the port of Naples, where 1.6 million tons of Chinese merchandise are unloaded a year — and another million pass through without a trace, evading taxes. In mapping out the Camorra’s control over garbage and industrial waste removal, as well as drug dealing, construction and public works fraud, Saviano considers human rights indicators (the price of an AK-47 is low in Campania), and economic ones (in the 1990s, the Mercedes sales in one Campania town were among the highest in Europe). Drawing on trial transcripts and his own reporting, he explains the internecine battles between rival factions of the Di Lauro clan for control of the region’s drug trade.

Part economic analysis, part social history, part cri de coeur, this crushing testimonial is the most important book to come out of Italy in years. Like Conrad’s London, Saviano’s Naples is also one of the dark places of the earth. He tugged a loose thread in the fabric of Italian bourgeois respectability and kept pulling until nothing was left.

The son of a doctor and a teacher, Saviano grew up in Naples, “a place,” he writes, “where bad becomes all bad and good becomes total purity.” At age 13, he saw his first murdered body on his way to school. His father taught him how to shoot a gun when he wasn’t much older. Armed with a university degree in philosophy, Saviano has worked for an anti-Mafia watchdog group and written articles for leading Italian publications. He has cited Michael Herr’s “Dispatches” as an influence, and approaches his hometown like a war reporter.

Far from the local extortionists of the past or even the contraband cigarette smugglers of the ’90s, today’s cammoristi have gone global. They sell toxic waste, hide purloined weapons in former military barracks in Eastern Europe, make deals with South American and Nigerian drug cartels, siphon off European Union farm subsidies and launder money through diamonds and by setting up generally legal fronts like clothing stores, bars and tourism outfits all over Europe. They stay connected through cellphones and text messages. When one clan boss is arrested, kids all over Secondigliano, a Camorra stronghold north of Naples, download his image onto their cellphone screen savers. Bosses follow their murders on television. “We’ve done two more pieces! And they’ve done one piece,” one says, watching the news. Saviano explains: “The expression ‘to do a piece’ came from contract labor or piecework. Killing a human being became the equivalent of manufacturing something.”

The drug wars continue to this day. When they flared up early in 2005, hundreds of journalists came from around the world. Local clan members offered to tell journalists their stories in exchange for cash, Saviano writes, while policemen made their plainclothes colleagues pose as drug pushers to satisfy the horde of photographers. Few got the real story.

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In Saviano’s account, today’s Camorra — or “the System,” as its members call it — has no ideology beyond economics of “the most aggressive neoliberalism.” Women, especially widows, are often promoted to high-ranking positions. Some even travel with their own circle of female bodyguards, dressed in yellow like Uma Thurman in the Tarantino film “Kill Bill.” The clans diffuse responsibility and blame through a complicated network of part-time workers, many of them teenagers. “The System at least grants the illusion that commitment will be recognized, that it’s possible to make a career,” Saviano writes. Indeed, the System appears as quick and adaptable as Italy’s mainstream economy is intractable and bureaucratic. A study released last month found that organized crime accounted for 7 percent of Italy’s gross domestic product, or $127 billion in receipts a year — the largest segment of the Italian economy.

As in Norman Lewis’s fascinating World War II diary, “Naples ’44,” where clever local bosses struck deals with the Allied occupation, in “Gomorrah,” the points of reference are less Western Europe than places where local warlords or sectarian tribes have effectively replaced the state. How this could exist in democratic Europe is an excellent question for political theorists. In its own idea of itself, Naples has always defied ideology; it is a city governed by realpolitik, where power is the native language and rule of law a mere dialect. The Camorra and the state feed off each other. The System’s economic grip “is born not of direct criminal activity,” Saviano writes, “but of the ability to balance licit and illicit capital.” Since clans are Campania’s “primary economic force,” he adds, for local politicians, “refusing a relationship with them would be like the deputy mayor of Turin refusing to meet with the top management of Fiat.” Though Saviano rarely names politicians’ names, “Gomorrah” is a brutal indictment of Italy’s ruling class: businesses and officials out to protect their own interests over the common good, leaving the South permanently crippled by organized crime.

In Saviano’s view, if the northern Italian businesses that fuel the country’s economy hadn’t sold their toxic waste to the Camorra on the cheap, Italy could never have met the economic requirements for entry into the European Union. Since 2002, an estimated three million tons of waste have been illegally dumped in Campania. In the book’s final scene, Saviano walks through a toxic wasteland, covering his face with a handkerchief against the dioxin fires. One suddenly remembers that in the “Aeneid,” written by another Campanian, the mythic entrance to the underworld is through Lake Averno, in Cumae, just west of Naples.

For such an important book, “Gomorrah” has some serious problems. Where the original Italian is forceful, if at times overheated, Virginia Jewiss’s translation is tentative and overly literal. She stumbles too often over colloquialisms and crucial words. Far more problematic, though, is the difficulty in pinning this book down. In Italy, “Gomorrah” was described as a “docufiction,” suggesting that Saviano took liberties with his first-person accounts. Farrar, Straus & Giroux calls it a work of “investigative writing,” a phrase that suggests careful lawyering. Some anecdotes are suspiciously perfect — the tailor who quits his job after seeing Angelina Jolie on television at the Oscars wearing a white suit he made in a Camorra sweatshop; the man who loves his AK-47 so much he makes a pilgrimage to Russia to visit its creator, Mikhail Kalashnikov. Did the author change any names? If so, readers aren’t informed. These are not small matters, and should have been disclosed.

But the emotional truth of Saviano’s account is unassailable. I could not get this brave book out of my head. After reading “Gomorrah,” it becomes impossible to see Italy, and the global market, in the same way again.

GOMORRAH

By Roberto Saviano.

Translated by Virginia Jewiss.

301 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $25.

Rachel Donadio is a writer and editor at the Book Review.

A version of this review appears in print on , on Page 622 of the New York edition with the headline: Underworld. Today's Paper|Subscribe